Mia Smugglers, Schemers And Small-time Dreamers

November 20, 1988|BY NICK TAYLOR

The long runways bracket both the tower and, a mile away, the terminal and its splay of seven concourses. The hangars and other service buildings lie outside. The controllers` view is a patchwork of dark green tropical growth, emerald golf courses, the pastel city skyline, and a lace of roads and waterways glinting silver in the sun.

Incoming planes appear in the blue sky like suddenly formed thoughts. Today, they are coming in over the Everglades and taking off to the east, over downtown Miami. Everything would be reversed if the wind were coming from the west; the controllers would then direct the pilots to runways 27 Right and 27 Left, and arrivals would swoop in over the glittering blue of Biscayne Bay.

Miami International handles a thousand flights a day on average. It`s the 9th-busiest airport in the United States, well behind more central hubs like Chicago and Atlanta. But it is served by twice as many international airlines as domestic, and a third of its flights are international.

The overnight passenger jets -- the long-haul flights of Aerolineas Argentinas, Brazil`s Varig, and LanChile, among others -- arrive at dawn, perking up the immigration and customs enclosures as they spill their sleepy cargo into the new day.

Then the domestic flights begin leaving and arriving. Those from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the northern rim of South America start arriving at midday. The arrival schedule builds throughout the afternoon, and at 5 or 6 o`clock, when the jets from England, France and Germany arrive, the terminal is awash with people, ticket lines are gorged, and the baggage claims are bedlam.

That is when the pickpockets and luggage thieves are at their worst.

A perfect ``mark,`` a well-dressed, 50-ish jewelry salesman, is leaving Miami after a successful week. He is waiting in line at the Piedmont Airlines counter, on his way to a visit with a customer in Jacksonville before heading home to Beverly Hills.

It is 6:45 p.m. The terminal is crowded. The counters are abustle and luggage is piled up chock-a-block around the waiting lines. The salesman is careful to keep his sample case, a green Skyway overnighter with tweed siding, close at hand, for it contains $100,000 in gold, silver and gems. The line edges forward. A woman beside the salesman asks to borrow his pen.

Of course, the pen is in his shirt pocket over his left breast, awkward to reach with his left hand. He puts down his case and fishes for the pen with his right. Quick as a wink, a man snatches the case and runs away.

After one stunned moment, confused by the woman still fussing with his pen, the victim follows in the direction of the thief. He runs down to the traffic circles that follow the curve of the terminal outside the baggage claims and peers across the traffic lanes. The thief is nowhere to be seen.

The Metro-Dade police react knowingly.

``I wish we could make announcements in English and Spanish begging people to watch their property,`` says Detective Jesse Varnell, a tall man with one blue and one brown eye, during a reconnaissance tour of the terminal. ``See what I mean?``

He indicates the crowded Air Jamaica counter, where people are talking in a circle and ignoring their luggage. But airport officials don`t like to disturb the placid mood of travelers on vacation by creating paranoia, Varnell explains -- even if the airport police have what they believe is the largest file anywhere of known pickpockets and luggage snatchers, more than 1,200 names and photos.

The jewelry salesman, elegant in a gray suit, bends over the file`s big loose-leaf binders in the airport police station and keeps turning the pages and shaking his head.

He has described the woman who took the pen from him: Latin female, 35 to 40, 140 pounds, long black hair, wearing a beige sweater top and a denim skirt. An airline clerk said that the man who took the case was also Latin and about the same age, 5 feet 8 inches, and maybe 220 pounds, with black hair and mustache, beige pants and striped shirt. But the salesman cannot put faces on the thieves.

``If it was like this`` -- he picks a bandito`s face with a drooping, evil mustache -- ``I would remember.``

TO CURB THEFTS FROM PASSENGERS, plainclothes detectives roam the terminal, especially at peak hours. They know that thieves favor the counters of European airlines -- British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa -- and those with South American destinations, all places where vacationers wait, distracted by their plans, their purses and wallets fat with vacation cash and credit cards.

The jewelry salesman is not a typical victim of airport theft. Varnell says that this was ``a well-planned, well-executed crime`` by people who had followed the salesman from a jewelry show he had been attending. A month later, the police still will have no firm leads.